


Murdered Fathers

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: The Future Is Not Set [1]
Category: Terminator (Movies), The Terminator (1984)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 04:45:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17615747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: The T-800 rescues John from the T-1000.They rescue Kyle and Sarah from incarceration.And the four of them try their hand at rescuing the future.





	Murdered Fathers

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [No Fate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17475959) by [Naril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naril/pseuds/Naril). 



> So, it says "inspired by No Fate," but it's actually a little more complicated than that... I was actually working on this before Naril's excellent story was posted, and their work inspired me to actually finish mine. So, thank you, Naril, for getting me to complete this fic. :)
> 
> I love Kyle. He's one of my favorite fictional characters of all time and *The Terminator* is my third favorite movie OF ALL TIME. I always look for fix-its where he doesn't die at the end, but they're so few and far between for some reason.
> 
> Dialogue has been taken from T2 verbatim in a lot of places.
> 
> This is kind of unrelated, but in the special edition of T2, has anyone else noticed the irony of Sarah chasing after Kyle in her dream and shouting his name? Because the whole first movie is always him chasing and shouting after her, but in that scene, it's backwards. I'm almost positive that was done on purpose.

The aftermath had been… well, he didn’t really know. He’d been about to die, after all, so it was only fair that his memory wasn’t great as far as that whole thing went. As if anything in his life could ever be considered fair.

But he thought about it a lot. Prison gave a man lots of time for reflection.

Because this time, Reese had said nothing. After the terminator had burned down that police station, there was no record of his arrest, and without documents or a driver’s license they’d chalked it up to him being from some country illegally. Until they found out what country he was from, he would stay impounded here. It’d been more than three years and that country hadn’t been figured out yet. But the important thing was that this time, he hadn’t said anything. He wasn’t stupid enough to try explaining again. It could cause problems.

That was why Reese was in prison, instead of in that psycho-something place like Sarah had been sent to. He was an accessory to the crime… or something like that. But Sarah had tried to explain things this time, and they’d been separated. John was somewhere. Reese didn’t like not knowing. He could read, of course. Soldiers in the resistance had always been taught to read, because it was a very useful tool. John wrote to him every so often, but Reese couldn’t place the addresses the letters were sent from. He’d been stuck out of his time for around fourteen years now, and he still didn’t really get how most of this shit actually worked.

But John wrote to him. It seemed important to Reese. His future commanding officer was just a child, but that child was smart enough not to put anything into the letters that would incriminate him or Sarah further. Reese had absolutely nothing to say in reply most of the time, but he always sent back a short note so that John would know it’d been received. Once, Reese had asked if John wrote to Sarah, too. John’s answer wasn’t in the next letter, but face-to-face, during one of the all-too-few visitations.

 

_“I’m not allowed. They won’t let me call or anything.”_

_“Why?”_

_“I don’t know.” John had shrugged and then whispered, so quietly nobody but the two of them could possibly hear it, “How come you got put here instead?”_

_“Because I kept my mouth shut. Have you told anyone anything?”_

_“No, sir.”_

_“Good.” Reese had leaned back, then, and ran a hand over his hair. “I can try to make contact with her. I’ll let you know.”_

_“Okay.” John seemed like he’d shrank. Reese was still bad at decoding body language, except for what was needed in the field - a soldier who can’t get the screams out of his head, or was pretending not to be injured as badly as she really was. Anything other than situational survival was usually lost on him. “Um… I’m getting put in a new foster home. I’ll write when I get there so you know where I am, sir.”_

_“Alright. Are they letting you keep Max?”_

_“Yeah, I’ll still have Max.”_

_“Good. He’s there to keep you safe until we get out.”_

_“I know.”_

_Reese frowned, but it was internal. “You need to stay strong until then. Remember everything, even if it doesn’t seem important, because someday it might be.”_

_“Yes, sir. I know.”_

 

That had been months and months back. Reese kept turning things over in his brain - they’d been forced to go back to the States eventually. John would need to know the area, be familiar, later on when he took charge of the resistance. He had to be in school, understand how people thought and behaved. Tactical knowledge and the ability to use assault rifles simply wasn’t enough. John Connor wasn’t just any soldier, he was a leader. For that to happen, he needed to know how people worked.

And then two months after infiltrating back into Los Angeles, Reese and Sarah had left John at home with the puppy so that they could blow the absolute shit out of that computer factory. John knew not to answer the door, because Sarah and Reese had a key. He knew not to pick up the phone.

Sarah had taken a hit to the shoulder, and Reese had been piled on to be more or less beaten into submission. She’d been deemed unfit for trial on the grounds of insanity - whatever the hell that really meant - and Reese had been shipped off to prison. The strange thing was that he did way better here than he ever had trying to set up “normal” for John.

Reese thought about this a lot. His cellmate was older than him, first name Fred. Fred sometimes asked why Reese acted like he’d been in ’Nam when he was obviously too young to’ve gone there. Fred had been in ’Nam. (Reese was still somewhat unclear on that matter, too.) So Fred asked him: “Why do you act like I do? You would’a been in school, then, right?”

“I’m not going to talk about it.”

And the issue had been dropped.

Most of the other prisoners wouldn’t get near him. Not that he minded. In the mess, he was generally alone with his thoughts for meals, just like in his cell. Reese heard them whisper about him on occasion, about how he never talked to anybody and had “crazy eyes.” Could eyes be crazy?

This morning, leaving the mess to go back to his cell, Reese had a bad feeling about something.

He actually hadn’t experienced the “bad feeling” in a long time. The whole ordeal with the terminator back in ’84 had been two days of nothing but “bad feeling,” which ended up with him being shot in the fucking liver, backhanded down the stairs, and then having to escape the hospital half-recovered because the authorities might catch up. “Bad feeling” in his own time meant he was about to lead a mission that would see at least one of his squad-mates killed. “Bad feeling” was worse than being shot, or burned, or any of the other injuries he’d sustained in his life.

About an hour after he started having the “bad feeling” was when the shooting started.

Reese was unarmed, but he’d made sure to keep strong, so he could handle himself even in this concrete death trap. But this was a situation with the “bad feeling.” He knew he wouldn’t like whatever was causing the gunfire… and besides that, it sure as hell didn’t sound like a normal prison riot. There was definitely shots being returned from somewhere.

He was alone in the cell - Fred had been put in the hole for something, so Reese was by himself for now. He kept careful watch of the block, at least as much of it as he could see, and listened.

Reese was looking the right direction as it came around the corner.

It was coming straight for him.

It was dressed a lot like the first one had been.

Fuck, _fuck,_ they’d sent another one? How had that happened? The whole place had been set to blow when Reese was sent back through the time-displacement!

He ducked back in, even knowing it was too late - the terminator would’ve missed nothing. They’d sent one after him, now, even though Reese knew he wasn’t important. Wouldn’t it be going after Sarah? Or John?

His guts clenched.

Maybe it had already gotten them, and that was why it was coming for him. He was just next on the list.

The sliding bars were simply yanked free by the machine. It had on sunglasses, but Reese could _feel_ its artificial sight trained on him. He was just standing there, waiting to die.

And then it talked.

“Kyle Reese.”

He said nothing.

“Come with us.”

Us? Did it say “us”?

And then John appeared. He grabbed Reese by the arm.

“Come on! We need to get mom!”

He’d heard reports, of course. Well… just the one report, actually. One of the bases had managed to capture a T-600 and fuck around with the CPU. They had their own terminator, which was programmed to help the resistance. It wasn’t a model with advanced AI like the T-800 series, but it did its job well enough until it broke down for some reason.

Apparently, this had been managed again, but with one of the improved units.

Reese sat in the back with John as they left the prison and started making their way towards where Sarah was being held. He only just managed not to smack the boy, but did end up screaming at him.

“I can’t believe you! I can’t fucking believe you did something that stupid!” Reese could feel the veins popping out in his temples and neck - it was like his eyeballs might explode out of his head. “Look at me, John! _I am not fucking important enough for you to launch rescue missions for!_ You need to stay safe! What the _hell_ were you _thinking?!_ ”

This was his future commanding officer. The lack of common sense John had displayed was ridiculous. It would get people killed later on if Reese couldn’t put a stop to it now.

But John didn’t really answer. He just replied: “We’re going to get mom next.”

Well… okay. _That,_ Reese could get behind. They were on their way to free Sarah.

Which begged the question - why, exactly, had Reese needed to be rescued? Why was the terminator here?

At least when he asked, it was pretty straightforward - there were two terminators. One sent by Skynet to kill John, and one sent by the resistance to stop it. As if anything could be weird anymore, considering his life, Reese nonetheless found it weird how that made sense. John would’ve remembered that in the year the T-1000 got sent to, both of his parents had been locked up, leaving him vulnerable.

In light of the report about the captured T-600, Reese wasn’t having that hard of a time swallowing the idea of the resistance sending them a terminator to help. A reprogrammed machine would be able to anticipate the moves of its counterpart, it was much tougher than any human soldier, and it would make for good muscle if (and when) the need arose.

But Reese wasn’t thinking about the tactical advantages. Instead he was trying to work out how this would look to Sarah. She’d hardened a lot in the years since their first nightmarish days together, sure, but she still didn’t have nearly the amount of exposure to the machines that Reese had. He would need to explain to her - assuming he could find the right words - about the report and about how this made sense. It made sense to him because he’d grown up with situations in the same vein. It might not make sense to Sarah.

Breaking into Pescadero was somewhat problematic - not getting past the security as much as they didn’t know where she was. John had known, at least approximately, where Reese had been placed because Reese had described it to him once. But contact with Sarah of any kind had been impossible.

The terminator had a shotgun while Reese had a sidearm, and more than that his limited patience had been KIA since he’d had a meltdown at John in the car. So he wasted no time stuffing the barrel into the face of a terrified woman sitting behind a computer: “Sarah Jeanette Connor. Find her. Now.”

Reese had no intention to kill her, of course, but she didn’t know that. The clacking of the keyboard reminded him of his Tech-Com unit.

“Sh-she’s in maximum security on the upper floor of the building,” the woman stammered.

Reese didn’t use any more words or even nod - he was already moving, with John and the terminator following after him. It didn’t look like the prison - the walls were bright white and so were everyone’s clothes, instead of unpainted concrete and orange jumpsuits - but it felt exactly the same. The people sent here were every bit as trapped as he’d been.

They took the elevator, and when it opened, the first thing Reese heard was the alarms and the shouting. The terminator took point, with Reese covering their 6 and John in between where it was safer. Maybe that had been a mistake, because it didn’t take long to find Sarah, and so the terminator was the first thing she saw. Chaos ensued.

Continuing in his recent streak of dumbassery, John broke formation to run towards Sarah while Reese and the terminator took down the offending parties with non-lethal means. It was exactly as bad as he’d feared, because Sarah was just staring in absolute panic at the machine, even with John grabbing her by the shoulders and yelling to try and get her attention.

Reese glanced around - all opposition neutralized at the moment - and then joined them, also reaching for Sarah. She responded to him instead of John.

“It’s okay, Sarah, it’s okay, it’s been reprogrammed and sent back to help,” Reese insisted, trying to get her to her feet so they could escape.

Movement - a man in a police uniform. Except Reese was having the “bad feeling” again, and he knew without knowing that this was the face of the enemy. The prototype simply stepped right through the bar-door, holding a sidearm because it could only form melee weapons.

It chased them into the elevator, with a blast from the terminator’s shotgun throwing it backwards enough for the doors to close. John was still young and inexperienced, so he couldn’t react as fast as they could. Reese was the least vital. It took less than a second to pass off his sidearm to Sarah, and then he was on the floor, curled over John. Even staying still, John wouldn’t get hurt, and that was the most important thing.

They were shooting up into the roof of the elevator while the T-1000 stabbed down through it repeatedly. One struck Sarah in the shoulder - she all but ignored it and kept firing. Reese paid attention to where the majority of the punctures took place and shuffled John to the opposite corner, still covering the boy with his own body. He noted that soon John would be too big for this tactic to keep working, which could be problematic.

Out of the elevator. Without time to find their original stolen car, they conveniently got a new one by bullying a police officer at gunpoint. Of course, the prototype wasn’t giving up that easily, which saw John on the floor jammed between the front and back seats while Reese and Sarah shot at it through the back window and the terminator drove. Reese was already calculating: they’d managed to knock the thing off, but it would still come after them relentlessly. It would always be able to find them eventually, and two guns was not enough when there were four people capable of using them.

Reese and Sarah shared a glance - they’d both been having these thoughts at the same time. Then Reese was checking Sarah to make sure there was only the one minor laceration, and Sarah checked John to make sure he was fine. After that came the (slightly less angry) speech from her.

“John, it was stupid of you to go there… you have to be smarter than that, you almost got yourself killed! What were you thinking?”

“I had to get you out of that place…” His eyes were watering. Reese tried to keep his annoyance under wraps, but for fuck’s sake, he thought he’d taught the kid to be stronger than this. “I couldn’t just leave you and dad locked up. It would’a come after you.”

Apparently refusing to explain himself further, John clambered into the front seat by the terminator.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Nothin’.”

Reese was only half-listening, because Sarah was now checking him for injuries, and once that was done they yanked each other in for a kiss. Three years with no contact. It had been awful, and Reese thought about her every day, wondering what they’d been doing to her at that place. When Reese had run his fingers over her to search for injuries, she’d flinched a little at her ribs - they were probably bruised. He just knew it wasn’t from her escape attempt, either, and he hated that. She could more than take care of herself, and Reese understood that, but he still wished he could’ve been there to help…

“I’ll live.” Sarah was watching him. Sometimes it was like she could see his thoughts written in his face like the details in an after-action report. “It’s not bad.”

“It’s not okay,” Reese ground out.

John looked over: “You’re not talking about me, are you?”

“No, we weren’t, but what you did wasn’t okay, either,” Sarah rebuked. “That was a stupid, unnecessary risk, and you know it.”

“Yeah, well…” John made a face and sat down again. He seemed to be muttering something.

“I thought we taught him better than that,” Reese murmured, settling beside Sarah. “Maybe we didn’t explain good enough.”

“He’s thirteen, Kyle. No thirteen-year-old anywhere has ever listened to common sense or to his parents, especially when the two are combined.”

“When it comes to life and death-”

“He’s thirteen,” she repeated, just as quiet as Reese was being. “We can try talking to him again later. He’s done listening to us yell today.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, eventually arriving at a derelict gas station. John and the terminator set about tending Sarah’s shoulder wound while Reese took inventory of their current weapons situation - ten shells for the shotgun, two magazines for the sidearm (not including the half-empty one currently loaded). That was far from ideal, but they had a few contacts in the area who could probably help them with that. In the meantime, Reese searched through the car and found nothing particularly useful.

John came over: “Hey, dad, can you come help us with this?”

Reese glared. “How many times to I have to tell you not to do that? What if you slip up later on and call me that when I’m under your command? Get out of the habit now.”

The boy huffed. “Whatever. Can you come help? We’re trying to reset the read-only switch or something.”

Reese followed him over to where the terminator was sitting under a mercury lamp that dangled from the ceiling. It began giving him instructions, so he set to work while reporting to Sarah. “We’re critically low on ammunition for both weapons and the car didn’t have any supplies. We’ll have to see about getting in touch with Enrique or Alberto.”

“Enrique’s closer,” Sarah decided, her eyes fixed on his hands as Reese opened the port. “Have you worked on one of these before?”

“Not personally. I’ve read reports. There was at least one case where a unit captured a T-600 and reprogrammed it, so I know it’s been done. Usually when we got them back to base for study they were destroyed and there wasn’t much useful information we could get by looking it over.” Reese slid the CPU free and searched for the pin switch. “Find me something that can fit in here?”

Sarah nodded and began poking around while John came back over. Reese hoped he wasn’t about to do something else stupid, because this whole day had been nothing but a string of disappointing decisions on his part.

“So that’s his brain, huh?”

“Yeah. Everything it knows is on this unit.”

“Kinda like people, I guess. ’Cause we’re controlled by just what’s in our heads.”

“When I replace the assembly, I want you to watch so that you know how to do it later on if you need to.”

“Okay.”

Reese happened to look at the right time and notice Sarah holding a rubber mallet. He nudged John’s shoulder and pointed: “You know what she’s thinking about?”

“Oh, shit.”

He was interested to see how John would handle this situation, so he didn’t say anything to tip the scale in either direction. “Are you going to let her?”

“She won’t listen to me…”

“So you’re going to let her,” Reese concluded.

“I don’t want her to, but-”

“John, you’re going to be a commanding officer someday. So make your decision. She’s going to come over here any second and make it for you.”

John made a face, but nodded - “Yes, sir.” - and almost ran over to Sarah, who’d been about to come talk to them. It took two seconds to escalate into a shouting match between the pair, but Reese did nothing to intervene, just standing still and pretending to contemplate the dark red CPU when in reality he was listening in to assess the boy’s response.

“You don’t know what it’s like to try to kill one of these things… and if something goes wrong, this could be our last chance, so _move!_ ”

“Look, mom! If I’m ever supposed to be this great military leader, maybe you should start listening to _my_ leadership ideas once in awhile!” John got quiet. “’Cause if my own mother won’t, how do you expect anyone else to?”

It wasn’t a terribly well thought out argument on the boy’s part, but he did have a very good point - if he was going to learn to be a commanding officer, they needed to let him make the decisions sometimes… even if they didn’t agree. Reese frowned to himself, thinking of how they’d both chewed him out for rescuing them. Maybe it wasn’t the call Reese or Sarah would’ve made, but in the end the objective had been accomplished with minimal harm coming to any of them. John had utilized the assets and resources at his disposal, along with his tactical knowledge, to recover his teammates.

Maybe he’d done better than Reese had initially thought.

“Alright, pay attention…” He took the pen offered. “So you push into the pin switch, but you only need to hold down for a second or two.” Reese set the pen aside. “Now when you replace the CPU, make sure it’s clean and your hands are, too. Any dirt can interfere with the electronics.”

They went through the rest of the simple process and Reese mentally struggled with the idea of telling John that he’d redone his assessment. This was his future commander, and when he’d stopped to think about it for a moment, the qualities he’d admired as a young soldier were beginning to shine through. He finished screwing the cover back in place and flipped the terminator’s scalp flap over it.

“We’ll be driving a lot tomorrow, but you should still get some sleep,” Reese decided, indicating the backseat of the car.

“Okay,” John mumbled, stalking off to do it. It seemed like he was still angry with them for chewing him out earlier; Reese decided he’d talk to John about it tomorrow during the drive to Enrique’s place, because there’s be plenty of time to do it and no other ways to pass that time.

With John in the car hopefully resting like he’d been told to do, Reese and Sarah sat leaning into each other in a corner. It felt so good to be with her again.

“So how was prison?” Sarah asked, way too conversationally.

“Nothing really happened most of the time,” he shrugged. “I thought about you a lot. The other inmates left me alone for the most part.”

“It’s because you’re creepy when people meet you the first time,” she told him. He looked over and she was grinning a little. “You just lurk around quietly and stare.”

Ah, now he understood. “I needed to do surveillance. The T-800s usually have different skins-”

“I’m teasing you, Kyle.”

“Oh.” He still wasn’t great at being able to tell when she was doing that, even after all this time. The first twenty two years of his thirty six year life hadn’t been especially humorous, and learning how to take jokes better wasn’t a priority for him. “Sorry.” He rested the side of his head against hers.

Waking up the next morning - it was 04:55, right on time. Sarah was still slumped into the corner with him, arms around his trunk with one hand under his shirt so her palm was on the giant scar in his flank. After three years, he’d almost forgotten about it, how she was always feeling that part of him even in her sleep. For Reese, it was just another one of so many uncounted memories, pain and long recovery times, sometimes with an infection. For Sarah, it was a reminder of how close she’d come to losing him, how close John would’ve been to never knowing his father until after the world came to an end.

“Sarah,” he murmured, brushing hair back from her face. “Wake up, we need to move out.”

She didn’t startle awake, which he’d seen her do plenty of times, but instead squeezed him a little on regaining consciousness. She didn’t even say anything, just kissed the side of his bristly face before getting to her feet. It just made him understand even more how much he’d missed her.

Reese had to think for a second before he remembered the actual location of Enrique’s hideout, then gave rough coordinates to the T-800 as the four of them piled into the car. Being in the back seat, he stretched around to look at the indicators - they’d need gas at some point. That could be a problem, he knew. Reese had no cash on him, Sarah wouldn’t have any either, and it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a terminator would bother with. They’d have to come up with something…

Tactically, this was shaping up to the exact opposite of an ideal situation. Their lack of ammo and weapons could be remedied by reaching the supply cache at Enrique’s, but without fuel they wouldn’t be able to get there. They’d have to come up with something, but stealing gasoline at gunpoint would attract attention and they absolutely didn’t need more of that. The authorities would already be looking for them after they’d broken free of their institutions.

Reese’s mind turned over. He was trying to come up with some solution - one that wouldn’t draw police investigation, that could get John to safety, that enabled them to arm themselves better. So far nothing he could think of met all three of those criteria, and it was frustrating. He was only a sergeant, after all. In his own time the officers made these calls, strategized. They gave the instructions for resource capture and he’d executed those orders. Now, it was on him and Sarah to make these decisions, and she was better at it than him.

“We’re going to run out of gas before we get there,” Reese told her.

“I know, I’m thinking…” Just then the terminator swerved around to pass another vehicle and Sarah’s attention was directed towards it instead. “Keep it under sixty five, we don’t want to be pulled over.”

“Affirmative.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” John laughed. “You gotta listen to the way people talk…”

As the boy was hassling the machine, Sarah seemed to have an idea, which already made Reese feel better. Hers were usually good ones, or at least better than his a lot of the time. When they finally stopped at a gas station, she got money from John (which was loudly protested) and headed over to the pump. Reese followed her while John and the T-800 went to get food for all of them, recognizing the look on her face. She was planning something big. The last time he’d seen that look, it’d ended up with them both being arrested.

“How much does it know about the way the war starts?” Sarah asked quietly as she began filling the car.

“I don’t know, it probably knows at least some of how things started,” Reese shrugged. “Why?”

“I’m just thinking…” She trailed off, staring out at nothing.

“Sarah.” Reese put a hand on her shoulder to get her attention back to him. “We have to be careful. They’re looking for us, and they could be looking for John, too. He’s the target, now, so he needs to be our first priority. We have to protect him.”

“I know. But there’s got to be a way to stop it,” she insisted. “The future isn’t set… that’s what you told me, and he told you to tell it to me. So if it’s not set, then why are we going to sit around and wait for things to happen on their own?”

“Because it goes both ways,” Reese warned. “The future’s not set, so we could stop it if we try. Or John could be killed, and there’s nobody to lead the resistance when the bombs fall.”

“You and the machine will take him to safety,” she decided. “And I’ll go stop it on my own.”

“No.” Reese shook his head. He grabbed her by both shoulders. “Sarah, listen to me. It’s too dangerous right now. All those police are out there looking for us, and if we don’t get out of California they’ll probably catch up to us eventually. We’ll all get separated again, and John will be on his own just like last time.”

“I can’t just let this happen…” she whispered, staring right into his eyes. “Everything you’ve said about your future… I can’t just wait for it to happen.”

“But we won in the end,” he pointed out, just as quietly. “That’s why I got sent back, remember? Because that was Skynet’s last chance. And we stopped that last chance, too. So we could change things and it’d either end up better or worse. We’ll have no way to know. If everything repeats again, the situation will be terrible, but eventually the war against the machines is won by the resistance. We could’ve been wiped out, but we weren’t, and that’s because of John. Stopping the future from happening isn’t our mission. John is.”

The arms of his prison jumpsuit were tied around his waist, so in just a short-sleeved undershirt his skin - and the barcode burned into it - was readily visible when Sarah grabbed his wrist and held it up. “This is the future for everyone unless we do something, Kyle. We might still have time to save everyone from this future.”

“It’s not my mission,” Reese repeated, but a little more unsure this time. He knew that Sarah’s point was just as valid as his, and this wouldn’t be the first time she’d convinced him to follow through a dangerous scheme with her. “What’s you plan, anyway?”

“First, we need it to give us specifics,” she answered. “And we’ll go from there.”

There was no stopping her - that much was obvious. “You can’t do this alone.”

“Kyle-”

“No,” he interrupted. “The machine can keep John safe even if we get caught again. I know you don’t trust it, but the guys who captured it and did the reprogramming would’ve been thorough.”

“You can’t be sure,” Sarah argued.

“Yes I can. Computers run on sets of instructions. You just find the instructions and rewrite them. Even if you don’t trust it, trust _me_ that it’s safe.”

Driving the rest of the way to Enrique’s, Sarah sat in the front and grilled the T-800 for information about Cyberdyne. Reese listened in as well, thinking about how this might go for them. Miles Dyson. They’d need to stop his research, but logistically that could be difficult. Looking at Sarah, though, he could tell - she already had the details worked out.

Finally arriving, there was a brief argument with Enrique, then they started in on the supply cache. Reese ditched his prison jumpsuit and worn sneakers for combat boots and black fatigues. It’d been years since he’d been in tactical clothes, longer even than he’d been in prison, but it still felt so familiar to be in cargo pants and a fatigue shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. Sarah looked every bit the resistance soldier, too, even with a tank top instead and a pair of sunglasses. As John and the terminator pulled stacks of weapons out from the hole, they picked through their armaments - Sarah went for a scoped AR-15 and Reese eventually decided on a modernised AK-74.

“I’ll finish this up,” Sarah told him as she loaded up the magazines for their rifles. “We’ll have Enrique tell John and the machine where to go.”

“Alright, I’ll let him know,” Reese decided.

Passing by the truck John and the machine were working on, he paused for a second to listen to them talk.

“It’s just weird, y’know? My dad hasn’t even been born yet…”

“Time displacement is more disruptive for humans than for cybernetic organisms,” the terminator remarked flatly.

“Yeah, I guess… he doesn’t have to be such a dick about it. He won’t even let me call him ‘dad’ anymore, because it’ll be weird or something when I meet him later. He’ll be just a kid. But I’m gonna be different then, too… and I think he dies before the nukes go off anyway.”

“It’s highly probable. Hold here.”

“Mom’s tough on me, too. When I was in foster care and I’d go hang out with my friends, their moms and dads would like, make them do dishes and stuff. My mom makes me do rifle drill and my dad has me sit with him and stare at maps for hours and shit like that.”

“The knowledge will be important for later.”

“Yeah, that’s what they always say too… but it still sucks. I’m just John Connor to them. ‘Great military leader’ and all that shit… other kids sit with their dads and watch TV. I don’t have a dad. I have a fucking drill sergeant.”

Reese remembered he had a minor objective to finish up before he left with Sarah to stop Dyson’s research. Walking away silently, he felt… hurt. He was tough on John for his own good. Hell, for _everyone’s_ own good. How could the boy not see that?

Approaching Enrique, Reese pointed to where John and the T-800 were climbing out from under the vehicle. “They need to go to Mexico like we planned. Sarah and I will catch up with them later.”

“Sure,” Enrique nodded before a swig of tequila. “Try not to get caught this time, eh?”

“We’ll do our best.” Reese went back over to Sarah. “Alright, we’re set.”

They stowed their weapons and climbed into the car. Pulling away, Reese could hear John shouting after them. Even as something in his chest clenched up at what the boy had said about him a few minutes ago, Reese was switching gears - they were on their way to their next objective. He buried his feelings like he always had. Feelings got people killed in the field.

“You’re making faces,” Sarah remarked, glancing at him from the driver’s seat. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” Reese answered, putting John’s comments away in the back of his mind. “How are we going to stop Dyson?”

“He’s not going to stop on his own,” Sarah commented grimly. “And we can’t just ask him nicely, either.”

“You’re going to murder him.”

“I don’t have a choice. You must’ve killed someone once.”

“No, we avoided it. There were people who didn’t want to help the resistance, but shooting other people was just helping the machines.”

“Well, then tell me how important one man’s life is stacked against three billion others,” she demanded. “Especially since stopping him is saving them all.”

It was horrible how sound her logic was. Reese didn’t want this to be the solution - he didn’t want to have to kill another man. But he also couldn’t see a realistic way around it and achieve Sarah’s objective. There was no talking her out of this, especially now they were en route. Besides both those things, Reese also remembered how difficult it’d been to convince Sarah of the truth, and she’d had a terminator actively trying to destroy her. Without that, without proof, it would be impossible to persuade Dyson through conversation.

“Wouldn’t there be others?” Reese questioned. “Whenever we were working on something in the resistance, it wasn’t just one guy, there’d be a team. Won’t Dyson have a team, too?”

“We’ll have to find them, too.”

“You’re ready to kill this man. What about the other five or ten who work with him? We need to think of another solution.”

“Like what?” It took Reese a second to understand that she wasn’t being sarcastic, she was asking him. She wanted there to be a different way, too. Unlike him, though, she was more than prepared to carry this out.

“I don’t know. Not this.”

“Kyle, three billion lives. And that’s just in the nuclear war. How many friends did you lose fighting the machines in your time?”

“Probably more than two dozen…”

“Exactly.”

Reese had never been on a mission like this. He’d heard the word tossed around by officers, sometimes, when an important leader was targeted by Skynet. Not an ordinary termination… _assassination._ Sarah was going to assassinate Miles Dyson, and Reese was going to stand by and watch. Because neither of them knew how else to stop Skynet from being designed, they were going to deliberately kill another human being. A human being who had no idea of his role in things. Nothing about this sat right with Reese, and his mind scrambled desperately for some other way, _any_ other way than this. He couldn’t come up with a single option.

They arrived at the coordinates given by the T-800. It was an odd structure, to say the least - lots of plate glass, a swimming pool. For someone so important to history, Miles Dyson didn’t live in an easily defensible location.

Reese crouched with his AK-74 to his chest, doing a cursory sweep for opposition and finding none (not that he was really expecting any). Sarah was glaring into the scope of her AR-15, and from this distance Reese could barely make out her target: the skull of a man sitting at a computer.

Somehow, at the exact moment Sarah pulled the trigger, Dyson’s head ducked out of the way. She fired again, but Reese could tell she hadn’t gotten him. Then she emptied the entire magazine into the room, loaded a second magazine, and fired off another thirty rounds to suppress the target. Sarah immediately got up and moved towards the smashed glass walls before Reese could say anything or try to stop her, leaving him no choice but to follow behind. He stumbled a little on some debris and it left enough time for her to get ahead of him, and shortly following Reese heard her sidearm go off three times.

The worst sound wasn’t the gun going off - he could hear the shouting of two other voices, which couldn’t belong to the target. Entering the next room, Sarah was standing over Dyson with her pistol raised - he was wounded in the shoulder, with a woman and a child both crouched by him… his wife and son.

It occurred to Reese in that instant that this was why everything about the mission was wrong. A little boy, putting himself between his father and a deadly weapon, showed everything Reese and Sarah hadn’t anticipated. This man, Dyson, had a life outside Cyberdyne. He was only one man, not a dangerous enemy to be destroyed. There had to be another way…

Turning to Sarah with these thoughts in his head, Reese could tell something similar was running through her mind, because now she was slowly lowering her sidearm and there were tears in her eyes. Reese slung his assault rifle over his back and gently took hold of her shoulders, eventually sitting them both down against a wall. He’d never been so relieved to have failed a mission.

And then this was the moment when John and the T-800 appeared, having of course not followed orders. Reese wasn’t able to care right then, though, about his child failing to do as told. Not after he’d come so close to enabling the murder of another child’s father. He’d be angry with Sarah for making this call and trying to go through with it, except he could already see she regretted it even more than he did.

Reese watched as the terminator sized up Dyson’s wound and determined it to have caused minimal damage, and finally the solution presented itself. It wouldn’t have been possible if John hadn’t disobeyed his orders.

“Didn’t you say something before about asking nicely?” Reese whispered to Sarah, squeezing her a little with his arms to try and comfort her. “Maybe with him here, we can do that, and Dyson won’t have to die.”

John led Dyson’s son away while the terminator cut the flesh from its own arm and explained everything. With some arguing, it was finally decided: Dyson would destroy all the information in his home, then lead them to the Cyberdyne building where they’d help him trash the research there, too. Reese helped Dyson pile folders for burning, which basically amounted to Dyson pointing to this and such of a thing with his uninjured arm and Reese gathering the specified items into a metal barrel to be doused in gasoline.

Ordinarily, Reese would do everything in his power to stop from feeling during a mission, but this time it seemed important not to do that. Because looking at Dyson’s son Danny reminded him of when John was that small, the wide-eyed belief that his parents knew everything and concerned with tiny problems. If only difficulties could stay that small as children grew. Now, John seemed to regard him as an insensitive, callous bastard, interested in grooming his son to become a military commander and absolutely nothing else.

It was made worse by the fact that Reese understood how he’d managed to earn this reputation for himself. He _had_ started forcing John to stop calling him “dad” very suddenly, and right before he’d gotten sent to prison no less. He did avoid pointless recreational activities in favor of schooling the boy on land navigation and how tactics change during inclement weather. He yelled a lot, and he wasn’t fun to be around, and he didn’t have the first fucking clue about how people were supposed to be affectionate to their offspring because his parents had died in the snow when he was six. There were no two ways around the fact that even after all these years, Reese didn’t know a damn thing about being a father. He was a strict leader, and nothing else.

Except… it hadn’t always been this way. Reese remembered how Sarah had had to teach him the right way to hold John, supporting his head and all that. He remembered being proud when John walked all the way across the room to him without falling. When had he stopped being John’s dad, and instead fell back into his role of sergeant? Why wasn’t he able to figure out a way to do both? Sarah, at least, was still _kind of_ John’s mom, understanding the saturation point when chewing him out for his bad decisions would no longer be absorbed and remembering to check him for injuries before reading him the riot act.

Once, when John was about five, Sarah had admitted that Reese still disturbed her a little on occasion, because his behavior was so jagged compared to the way normal people acted. He thought about this now. There were plenty of things _he_ found disturbing, even fourteen years post-arrival, like how overfed the general population could be at times (and by extension how fucking _lazy_ they were), or the stupidity of most TV programs, or why anyone anywhere was entertained by war movies. They shouldn’t make films about that stuff, because it was always too glamorous and tame. There were no body parts that couldn’t be identified to a particular soldier, or the face of a woman you’d trained beside burned clean off by plasma but somehow leaving her alive and suffering, or one of your buddies not being able to get the terrors out of his head and finally driving him to shoot his platoon leader completely unprovoked one evening.

Reese wondered if his behavior was disturbing for John sometimes, too. John and Sarah hadn’t grown up in a world doing its damnedest to kill them at every turn, so they didn’t wake up screaming every other morning reaching for the closest weapon the way he still did. And especially after more than three years of foster care… John had been around average people, leading average lives with average worries. No night terrors or fits of rage that were barely warranted when a weapon or kitchen appliance didn’t cooperate. No constant talk of nuclear war, mass death, and tactics against Skynet. No weapons training.

Reese forced himself to lock these thoughts away again, so they could be examined and dealt with later. Their mission objective had changed, now, and that demanded his focus. There wasn’t time to mull over how bad he was at having a relationship with his son, or to (for the thousandth time) try and deconstruct this idea of post-trauma stress that Sarah had detailed to him.

Entering the Cyberdyne building. Reese’s skin prickled looking at the sign, because “Cyberdyne” was a word that would forever be associated with death for him. He hung back a little from everyone else, because despite how Sarah and the T-800 were dressed, he knew he still looked the most suspicious. At least the stock of his AK-74 folded so he could hide it a little behind his back. Their supplies were left out of sight by the entrance, and Reese stayed there to guard. He was under no illusions about how their entrance would go.

It wasn’t long before the terminator came back to collect the bags, at which point Reese also came into the building, carrying some of it himself. He was in charge of arming the explosives for this operation, so the charges were on one shoulder and his assault rifle on the other. Dyson gave them a rundown of how they’d access the components of the original terminator while they were on the elevator. Entering the target area, though, Reese started having the same “bad feeling” he’d had before the machine had broken him out of prison. His gut was telling him things were about to go catastrophically wrong somehow.

Dyson swiped his card through the next pad - and it buzzed, not unlocking. He looked confused. “My card should access this.” Another swipe and another buzz. A third swipe, same result. Dyson yanked on the little security door.

“What? What is it?” Sarah questioned.

“Dammit,” Dyson grumbled instead of answering. He looked around to a screen on the wall. “The silent alarm’s been tripped.” While Dyson banged uselessly on a keyboard, Reese noted John moving over to the keypad and rummaging his backpack. “It’s neutralized all the codes in the entire building. Nothing will open anywhere now… we have to abort.”

“No,” Sarah insisted. “We go all the way.”

“You guys get started on the lab,” John tossed over one shoulder. “I can open this.”

The four of them paced over to the next door - Dyson was a little fidgety. “I have a personal entry code for the lab, it may still work.” He swiped his card, punched the numbers, and received a buzz of denial for his efforts. “It’s no good.”

The T-800 stepped up, hefting his grenade launcher. “Let me try mine.”

Reese immediately moved back around the corner - he was loaded with C-4 and shouldn’t be so close to a rifle grenade going off. “John, fire in the hole!”

Even covering his ears, Reese still flinched slightly from the noise of the blast - he could feel the rumbling vibrations in his chest. Looking back towards where the door had used to be, an alarm immediately went off while some kind of gas started shooting down from the ceiling. He and Sarah started to follow the terminator through the hole, but were stopped by Dyson.

“You can’t go in there! The fire set off the Halon system, you have to wait a few minutes until the gas clears!”

Shortly following, though, the machine reappeared holding masks with tanks. “Put this on.”

There were only two, so Reese and Sarah went in first to smash out some windows and hopefully vent the gas quicker. He turned his unit over to Dyson, then looked at the terminator: “Can you tell when it’s safe to breathe in there again?”

“Yes. I can run an analysis of the air. The supplied air tanks won’t be needed once the oxygen is no longer displaced.”

In the meantime, Reese set up the remote detonator but left it unarmed. After about six minutes, the machine signalled him that it was safe and he followed it into the lab. Dyson set aside his air tank and began leading Reese and Sarah around, pointing out which items needed to be rounded up for disposal.

“All the disks in my office, all the disks from that office over there, everything behind my desk, and all the processors on my left.”

Reese started gathering the appointed disks because Sarah’s arms were already full, while she briefly talked at Dyson.

“We’ll blow those with the C-4.”

Everything was being piled up in one spot, or at least the stuff that could be easily carried. Reese dumped his armload of disks and went for his cargo bag of explosives so he could start arming the C-4. He could hear the machine brutalizing computer processors with a fire axe in the background while he wired up units of explosives. Meanwhile, his “bad feeling” was getting stronger, making him acutely aware of the AK-74 slung over his back. He felt naked without a weapon, but the way he understood things was that if anything came over to try and stop them, it would most probably be other humans, and the idea of killing them still didn’t sit well with him.

John came running over as Reese and Sarah were placing the C-4 and the remote detonator: “Piece of cake.” He held up the key to show them. “We got company.”

“Police?” Dyson guessed.

“How many?” Sarah demanded.

“All of ’em, I think,” John shrugged.

“Go, we’ll finish here,” Reese ordered, glancing around. Some antennas to be raised, and a quick check to make sure he’d armed the explosives correctly. Then they could leave with the remnants of the first terminator, hopefully without having to lethally shoot anyone.

“I’ll take care of the police,” the machine informed them.

“Hey, wait! You swore!” John shouted, which was a little confusing.

The terminator, amazingly, looked at the boy and smirked: “Trust me.”

Rushing around with Sarah to finalize the destruction that would soon take place, Reese decoded the words: “take care of” could mean several different things, but coming from a terminator would normally only mean one thing. John was upset about this. He’d made the T-800 promise not to kill people…? The conclusion was surprising and interesting, and for the first time since - well, _ever_ \- he realized that he was very proud of a decision his son had made. John understood the value of human life, and that was indescribably important. Reese decided he’d let John know, at a more convenient time, how impressed he was by this.

Distantly, Reese could hear a window get smashed, then the repetitive noises of transport machinery. Shortly following was a long volley of gunfire and the distinct explosions made by a grenade launcher.

John and Dyson reappeared; the boy was holding a metal forearm. “Ready to rock?”

“Ready,” Sarah agreed, taking the part and stuffing it into John’s pack.

Reese pulled his rifle off his back and unfolded the stock as he moved over to them. He still didn’t want to have to use it, but wasn’t stupid enough to think he wouldn’t need to.

The terminator came back to them as well: “Time to go. Now.”

Sarah loaded one of the air tanks into John’s arms: “Take this, they’ll use gas. Get started on the door… Miles, hand me the detonator.”

Dyson was walking over with the electronic switch and Sarah was shouldering the other supplied air tank when a door behind them was flung open and soldiers with MP-5s stormed in. Reese and Sarah both dove behind cover as the shooting started, but Dyson wasn’t so lucky - Reese could hear him crying out in pain as he was riddled with bullets. John was shouting after them. The terminator could keep the boy safe, but Reese knew that the object they’d found themselves huddling behind wasn’t sturdy enough to stop bullets for long.

Sarah fired her sidearm wildly over top of the processor; it went otherwise quiet, so Reese guessed these soldiers weren’t so cocky that they were dumb enough not to take cover.

“Reloading,” she told him, reaching for a full magazine.

“Firing,” Reese answered, letting off bursts from around the side. It would at least pin them for a little while, but not long. They couldn’t stay here. “Reloading.”

As Sarah shot aimlessly with her pistol, Reese glanced around - doorway. There were lots of desks and computers around, so if they stayed low, they could get through it and possibly escape. He tapped her arm and pointed. As soon as she’d stopped firing, they made a break for the door, with her in front while Reese threw shots randomly backward without looking. Making it through the door, glass shattered and rained across the floor around them, and then they were ducked behind some kind of metal cabinet. His brain scattered in all the necessary directions: he had half a magazine still loaded and two left after that, Sarah would have at least three more magazines, this cover was more durable than the last one had been… and there was no exit. They’d trapped themselves in here.

The machine rescued them - it simply crushed its way through the drywall, grabbed them by the straps of their web gear and dragged them clear. There was promptly a deafening blast as the T-800 made an exit to the hallway with the grenade rifle, and the four of them made for the elevator. Reese was still evaluating the situation: in a room with no way out, the soldiers would think they were still pinned, which bought plenty of time to escape. On the other hand, Sarah had made mentions of gas, and they now only had one air supply for three people. If need be, Reese would go without, because he was the least valuable. (That didn’t in any way mean he was enthusiastic about the idea.)

Riding the elevator down, it was briefly rattled by an enormous explosion on the floor above. Apparently Dyson had managed to destroy his research after all, and given how he’d looked when Reese lost track of him, he’d almost certainly died for it.

The T-800 stepped out first, undoubtedly running some kind of scan, and almost immediately something was shot down the hall towards them from the lobby. Gas streamed out of it, exactly as Sarah had predicted, so Reese shoved her and John back into the elevator and covered his eyes with his arm.

“Stay here. I’ll be back,” the machine instructed, and Reese heard it walk off.

The mask was shoved into his hands. He took two breaths and passed it back; the three of them kept going around, taking two breaths and holding until it was their turn again. In-between, Reese’s nose started running and it made him glad he’d covered his eyes. He was familiar with this irritant - it’d been used to help incapacitate them during the ill-fated computer factory mission. That meant it was annoying, but not deadly. Annoying could be worked around.

Out in the lobby, Reese could hear gunfire, at first primarily from more machine pistols. Shortly after his next pair of breaths it started shifting, now the terminator’s sidearm and shouts of pain as the soldiers were incapacitated. For about a minute, things were quiet, then came the noise of a vehicle crashing through glass and Sarah was dragging them both out of the elevator. Reese cracked his eyes open for half a second and it was enough to get into the truck without doing a faceplant.

“Go!” Sarah ordered, and they were moving.

Someone was firing after them with a shotgun, but it didn’t matter. Reese spared a second to wipe his burning nose before doing his next assessment - an assortment of tactical gear. It was perfect. The last time he’d been hurtling along a highway in a truck, he’d gotten shot in the chest by a terminator, so he threw on one of the ballistic vests and picked his assault rifle back up. Meanwhile, Sarah had buried John under a pile of those vests and was now fastening some of them to the windows in the back doors.

“Chopper’s coming in!” she shouted.

“It’s him,” the terminator informed them.

The situation took a nosedive from there. The T-1000 could very easily keep up with them from a helicopter, shooting at them all the way, and ultimately made Reese very glad he’d chosen to wear one of the ballistic vests. Because while he did manage to get shot in the chest again, this time instead of puncturing his liver almost killing him it only managed to break two of his ribs. Sarah took a hit to her leg, but it looked like it had only gone through the muscle and not hit her femur or an artery. Following them both getting shot, they crashed, which meant Reese also broke both the bones in his left forearm by landing on it wrong. His face slammed into the metal interior of the truck, splitting a gash in his forehead; so now on top of four broken bones there was blood running down into his eyes.

Stealing someone’s truck - Sarah was limping and the terminator had to sit in the back so it could shoot, which meant that Reese had to drive half-blind with one working arm. The prototype ran them down in a large trailer truck, ramming into them from behind until the T-800 jumped onto the engine and crashed it. Reese was still bleeding, so in the two seconds it took to steer with one knee while he wiped his eyes he managed to crash headlong into something. This sent him sprawling into the steering wheel with all his weight, and as a reward for his efforts he received a third broken rib.

Reese was gasping with pain as he dragged himself out of the small pickup truck, left arm dangling and right hand frantically rubbing his eyes to clear the red out of them. Sarah was limping but still doing better than he was; the T-800 had large portions of its metallic chassis showing; John, mercifully, was unharmed.

The terminator paused for a second to snap the bones of his arm back into place, and even as they were moving Reese managed to get the ballistic vest and his web gear off so he could use his fatigue shirt to tie a metal bar on so they’d stay straight. The pain was incredible, but he could turn it off like he always hard. Necessity overrules pain.

The machine hung back to buy them time by getting into it with the prototype, so the three of them struggled along, looking for a way to escape. The heat of this place was terrible, and worse, it made it more and more difficult for Reese to ignore the sensation of being stabbed with every breath. He’d been more badly hurt than this, but for some reason he couldn’t shrug this off as well as he had before. Well, before, he’d been twenty two. Now, he was thirty six. Older soldiers didn’t do as well with combat injuries as younger soldiers did.

Case in point: Reese’s vision was still bleary from getting blood in his eyes, so he misstepped on the stairs and went crashing down onto his broken ribs. This felt too similar to before… only this time John was here, and could be killed. Reese could hear the banging around as both terminators beat each other into anything near them, and he knew it would only be a matter of time before the prototype bested the T-800 and came after them again.

Unable to breathe right, blinded, exhausted, agonized, he could only do what he’d done back then and scream at them as hard as he could: “Run!”

 

_He beat on its head with a pipe, every movement making it feel like the gunshot wound in his torso was ripping open even more. This was it and he knew it - the pipe lost his hand and he was smacked down off the platform._

 

Reese gasped raggedly, trying to roll onto his back and ease the pressure against his ribs but not having enough strength in his good arm to do it. His mind flicked back and forth between the then and the now, unable to decide where it was. It was like his nightmares, only he was awake this time.

 

_Pipe bomb. Get the pipe bomb. He lit it, let the fuse cook a little. Stuffed the pipe bomb into the body of the machine and let himself fall the rest of the way down. His body was quitting on him. The explosion shoved him a little further away. Made him hurt even more, if that was possible. Grayness. He was floating away._

 

Reese was lucid long enough to notice the T-1000 approaching. He didn’t understand why it stepped over him and kept going; was it because he wasn’t a threat anymore, or was he just not worth the effort? Was the ambient heat fucking with its sensors, making it think he’d been killed? Why?

 

_“Is that him?”_

_“That’s him,” she nodded, smiling, her hand still over his._

_The tiny movements under his palm were incredible. It made him forget about how his side still pulled a little stiff every so often, about the nightmares._

_Because his sense of touch was telling him - this was his son. They’d get to meet for the first time, just a few months from now._

 

The stair was cutting into his leg, making his foot start to go numb. Reese so wanted to move, to get up and fight like he should be doing. Or at least change position so that he’d be in less pain. But there was no strength left that he could find. He felt like it’d been stolen from him, somehow.

 

_“Can I try? I wanna try, daddy!”_

_“Not yet. Someday.” He finished reassembling the sidearm and set it on the table. “Someday you’ll have to learn all this stuff.”_

_“Can you read me a story?”_

_Literacy was important, so he nodded. “Sure. Go pick a book.”_

 

Reese could hear voices shouting, but they were distant. He felt like he was getting slowly cooked - it wasn’t the same as when he’d been trapped in that burning car, but it wasn’t comfortable. The split in his forehead had finally scabbed over, though, so when he tried to open his eyes it was sweat that ran into them instead of blood. He reached for one of the steps with his good arm and tried to move himself again, but just grabbing it in the first place took all his energy.

 

_“Tell me your job while we’re gone.”_

_“Don’t watch TV, don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the door. I have to hide under my bed with the lights off until you get back. If Max starts barking and won’t stop, I climb out the window and run.”_

_“Good. We should only be gone for a few hours.”_

_“Okay, d-I mean, yes, sir.”_

_At least the boy had caught it this time, so he didn’t have to start shouting again. He didn’t have energy to waste on shouting. They had a mission._

 

Hands. Reese was rolled onto his back, and even though the pain drew a groan from him, he could already breathe a little easier.

“Kyle, get up.”

“Ughn…”

“Kyle, _get up._ We need to leave.”

Different hands, pulling on his good arm. “Dad, come on, get up. We gotta go before the cops get here.”

Slowly, very slowly, Reese realized it was John and Sarah. Naturally, when he opened his eyes, they fixed on her first.

“Sarah… hurts…”

“I know, but you need to get up. Don’t fall asleep again, you probably have a concussion.”

They managed to haul him to his feet by pulling on his shoulders, but even with his legs being one of the only parts of him that didn’t get hurt he was in no way able to drive. He just sat in the back of their newly-stolen car, doing his best not to lose consciousness again and flinching every time they hit a bump.

“Where’s the terminator?” he managed to ask once his mind had cleared a little more. In spite of how much it must’ve hurt, Sarah was driving them to another contact on the border and they were getting fairly close. Just a couple more hours if he’d been paying attention right.

“Gone,” Sarah answered. “All the evidence got destroyed. We knocked the other one into a vat of metal and threw everything else in after it.”

“Oh. Alright then.”

“I saw you get hit, are you two minutes away from death again?”

“No… broke some ribs. It’s not bad. My arm’s worse.”

“We’ll be at Alberto’s in about three more hours, once we get there we’ll clean up and see about going back to Mexico.”

“Yeah, sounds good…”

“Kyle.”

“Hm.”

“You need to stay awake like I said.”

“Alright.” Reese felt bad about getting injured; he should’ve been helping more, not just lying on the stairs and waiting to die. Slowly, painfully, he leaned up from his seat and rested his palm on her upper arm. “I’m sorry I was so useless.”

“You’re not useless,” she answered, glancing at him through the rearview mirror. “But you shouldn’t touch that shoulder, I got stabbed.”

“I’ll get stabbed for you next time,” Reese promised. He meant it, too, so it was surprising when she started laughing.

Finally reaching Alberto, Sarah and Reese were bandaged up and splinted, gathering supplies out of a cache they’d left there for themselves. In the meantime, John just sulked. Reese didn’t really get why he’d be in such a shitty mood, because they’d managed to stop a terminator from killing him (for the second time, no less).

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, going over to the boy.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to me, you’re having some kind of problem.”

“Go away.”

Reese glared. “There’s no reason for you to be upset - you’re out of danger and you didn’t get hurt.”

“He was my friend!” John shouted, glowering right back. “Nobody else ever gave a shit what I think about anything! But I guess having friends isn’t part of my training, right? You don’t care, as long as I know how to lead people!”

The boy threw a surprisingly hard punch into his abdomen, and even though it wasn’t anywhere near his broken ribs, they still spiked with pain on the impact. John tried to hit him again, but Reese was able to grab his wrist.

“Stop! Enough!” he ordered, forcing John’s arm back down. “Listen…” He tried to find words. For a very long and very uncomfortable moment, there weren’t any. “I don’t… I’m not…” _I’m not a good parent and I know it._ “Did you tell it not to kill people?”

“What?” It looked like the boy needed a second to figure out what he meant by that. “Yeah, I did.”

“That’s good,” Reese told him. “I was thinking about that… and… it’s what I would’ve done. Do you understand? It was a good decision, and… I’m proud of you for making it. Now stop trying to hurt me. It’s not going to fix anything.”

John was making a weird face at him that he couldn’t place. “It makes me feel better.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate you.”

Reese thought hard about this. After hearing John bitching about him to the T-800, it was incredibly difficult to convince himself that the boy didn’t mean it. He would ask why, but he already knew the answer.

“Do you actually hate me or are you just mad at me?”

“I don’t know.” All the fight seemed to go out of John. Good. Reese wasn’t interested in hurting his ribs more. “I know I gotta learn all this shit before the world ends, but how come you can’t just be my dad sometimes, too?”

It was a hard question to answer. Reese didn’t think telling the truth would help, here, but there was nothing else he could come up with to say.

“Because I don’t know how.” He stopped and thought. “I’m always your dad, John… I just don’t know how to act like it.”

“Well, maybe you need to try harder and not just fucking order me around all the time.”

It was like an electrical shock - Reese suddenly remembered overhearing something once, when he’d been doing weapon maintenance. A mother talking to her sick child who wasn’t hungry: _“I’ll make a deal with you, Shaun. You finish eating and we’ll play Go Fish.”_

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Reese decided. “You work on being a better soldier, and I’ll work on being a better dad.”

John was making faces again, but finally nodded. “Okay. But you need to keep up your end of the bargain.”

“I will.”

“And I’m not saying ‘yes sir’ anymore. I hate that.”

Reese sighed. “Alright.”

“And I need a new dog.” John was sulking again. “The liquid metal terminator killed my dog.”

He nodded. “We’ll get you another dog when we’re back in Mexico… and you’re big enough now I can show you how to train them.”

“Is that another soldier thing?”

“Yeah, but it’s not just so you can use them to spot terminators… it’s… good for people. You make friends with it when you’re teaching it. That’s what you said, anyway, when you were showing me how to do it.”

“Time travel sucks,” John grumbled. “It’s too confusing.

Reese nodded and rolled his eyes in agreement: “Time travel sucks.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the way I handled the part where they're in the steel factory is okay... I just couldn't come up with a different way to have Kyle there without it feeling completely fucking shoehorned.
> 
> Also, the way I handled Kyle's parenting skills (or lack thereof) here is a lot different from almost all of the other works I've read in this vein. Usually it's like "they're a happy family life is good," but I think it would be a LOT more complicated than that. Kyle is a soldier with PTSD who survived a death camp. He would have some major issues that probably couldn't be worked out properly, since they're off-grid so he has no access to therapy. Please don't be mad that I made him imperfect. I don't want him to be perfect, because if he's perfect, he's not Kyle.
> 
> Kudos/comments (comments especially!!!) are welcomed and encouraged.
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, please feel free to check out my original WIP, [Nucleus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10027367).


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